Giving Life, Giving Death

Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy

Lucien Scubla, Malcolm B. DeBevoise

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781611862089
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628952674
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Although women alone have the ability to bring children into the world, modern Western thought tends to discount this female prerogative. In Giving Life, Giving Death, Lucien Scubla argues that structural anthropology sees women as objects of exchange that facilitate alliance-building rather than as vectors of continuity between generations. Examining the work of Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, as well as ethnographic and clinical data, Giving Life, Giving Death seeks to explain why, in constructing their master theories, our greatest thinkers have consistently marginalized the cultural and biological fact of maternity. In the spirit of Freud's Totem and Taboo, Scubla constructs an anthropology that posits a common source for family and religion. His wide-ranging study explores how rituals unite violence and the sacred and intertwine the giving of death and the giving of life.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Freud and the Oedipus Legend
• Chapter 2. Procreation and Headhunting: Fatherhood among the Marind
• Chapter 3. The Guardians of Dogma: Jones, Malinowski, and the Maternal Uncle
• Chapter 4. The Atom of Kinship, or the Absent Mother
• Chapter 5. Incest of the Second Type: Impasses and Issues
• Chapter 6. The Brother-Sister Relationship and the Principle of Male Dominance
• Chapter 7. Conceptualizing Difference or Dissolving Hierarchy?: From Asymmetry to Parity
• Chapter 8. Testart’s Law: Division of Labor and Sexual Identity
• Chapter 9. Nature and Culture: The Return of the Sophists in Western Thought
• Chapter 10. Reik, Guardian of Dogma: Couvade, Initiation Rites, and the Oedipus Complex
• Chapter 11. Hierarchy of the Sexes and Hierarchy of Knowledge, or Plato among the Baruya
• Chapter 12. Ethnology and Psychology in Róheim and Devereux: Identity, Homology, or Complementarity?
• Chapter 13. Should Totem and Taboo Simply Be Forgotten?
• Chapter 14. Freud, in Spite of Everything
• Chapter 15. Conceiving and Transmitting
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index